Friday, December 14, 2012

The Newtown School Shooting And What It Should Tell Us

Somehow an armed gunman managed to sneak on campus armed with a handgun and a .223 rifle and gun down 27 people. That death toll includes 18 children, and the gunman. It's not known for certain at present whether he was shot by police officers or killed himself, although CBS is reporting the latter.

The killer, identified as 24-year-old Adam Lanza, was the son of a female teacher at the school who was killed in the mass shooting. Most of the deaths occurred in her classroom. Ms. Lanza taught kindergarten.*

What also didn't help was that there was absolutely no provision for training and arming of qualified teachers or administrators. This atrocity occurred in a legally mandated gun-free zone.

It's worth mentioning that these sort of mass killings in schools were unknown until President Clinton's Gun Free Schools Act was passed and signed by the president in 1994. That law required all states to put laws in place to prohibit firearms on school campuses, regardless of the state laws on firearms and concealed carry.

The teachers and administrators at Sandy Hook Elementary obeyed the law. Some of them, and some of the innocent children they had charge of are dead because of it.

The maniac who murdered these people could have cared less. He broke the law simply by taking a firearm onto school property even if a brief moment of sanity had asserted itself and he managed to never pull the trigger.

The left will never acknowledge this basic truth. They will never admit to the connection between President Clinton's Gun Free Schools Act, the deaths today and the preventable deaths previously, and they will shamefully exploit this senseless tragedy for 'political capital' to try to further erode our rights to self defense..thus leading to more horrible and needless incidents like today's.

They will never admit to any of it, because their agenda has nothing to do with 'preventing gun violence'. It has to do with attacking that most individual of the Bill of Rights, the right to preserve your life and that of your loved ones.

The Bill of Rights was written for the express purpose of declaring what government may not do, and thus establishing the limits of governmental tyranny towards individuals. Without the right to choose to be armed, none of the other rights are defensible. That's exactly why the Left wants it gone. If they are able to ghoulishly use this tragedy to get their way, (and they will almost certainly try) the rest of those individual rights can be taken away easily.

In 'The Prince', Machiavelli wrote 'To be disarmed is not only to be defenseless, but despised.' Like it or not, he was entirely correct.

The wealthy, the members of the political elite and their families are amply protected by either private security or security paid for by the taxpayers. Legislation stripping away the protection of those they rule will only lead to more and more innocent deaths, as they're left defenseless.

The killings at Sandy Hook are an example.

Connecticut's gun laws are some of the strictest in the nation, modeled on neighboring New York state's statutes. None of these laws would have stopped Adam Lanza.

He was known to the school's personnel, so he was allowed in without question. The firearms he used were registered not to him, but to his mother. In fact Lanza tried to obtain a rifle in his own name, but was denied because of his history of mental illness. So he simply stole his mother's weapons. He could just as easily decided to kill with a machete or with an explosive device.Or if he wanted a gun badly enough, he would have found a way to obtain one. Someone who really doesn't care what's legal and illegal will always find a way. In his state of mind, it didn't matter.

So, how do we stop the Adam Lanzas of the future?

We don't. A psychotic is a psychotic. Like a drunk driver, sometimes you just run into one. or they run into you.

But there are things we can do to both minimize the damage and the occurrences.

First, the media needs to clean up their collective act. We live in an 'American Idol' society, where everyone wants their 15 minutes of fame, especially younger teens growing up in what more and more seems a deliberate destruction of our culture and traditional values.

A lot of the Adam Lanzas seem to want to essentially get that fame by committing what amounts to suicide publicly by taking a lot of innocent lives with them. Imagine the effect on wannabes and copycats if it was denied them?

You can't stop the media from reporting on stories, unless it's something like Fast and Furious that doesn't fit the agenda.But there's nothing that says they have to mention the killer's name. The story can be fully reported without it.

After all, the media has been known to go to enormous lengths to avoid mentioning race or ethnicity when it comes to crime or terrorism unless the perpetrator happens to be white.Why not eliminate that one detail of a name and deny potential Lanzas the added gratification of going out famous? Isn't it worth a try?

The most important thing that would prevent more tragedies like Sandy Hook is repealing President Clinton's 1994 Gun Free Schools Act. Allow individual states to decide whether or not to allow trained teachers or administrators to have firearms on campus based on their gun laws and let's see the results after a few years.

In Israel, schoolteachers and security guards are routinely armed and have received excellent training, almost all of them having been in the military. Most schools have contingency 'what if' plans.

In spite of the obvious dangers of terrorism and the fact that a large part of the population is in the reserves and has military assault weapons at home, with two exceptions there's never been an incident anything remotely like today's killings at Sandy Hook and both involved Arab terrorism.

The Israelis learned a bitter lesson in 1974 when a patrol of Arab terrorists took over a school and murdered 25 hostages including 22 children using grenades and automatic weapons during the Ma'alot massacre.They took contingency measures and teachers were allowed to be armed in classrooms to try and prevent anything like that happening again.It worked.

The last time anything like Ma'alot was attempted in Israel was at the Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva in 2008 before the security barrier was fully completed. An Arab terrorist broke in while the students were at their religious studies. And while 8 religious students were horribly slain, the death toll was mitigated when two IDF soldiers, former students who happened to be visiting the yeshiva took out the Arab killer with their personal firearms.

Ask yourself how many of the children murdered today might be alive if there had been some armed and trained adults available to confront Adam Lanza in the only way possible.

You don't defend the innocent against insanity and murder by legislation. You do it by being ready, willing and able to take up arms on their behalf to protect them.

That's the message we should take away from what happened today at Sandy Hook Elementary.

UPDATE: * The dinosaur media in their rush to get this story out got a number of things dead wrong.One of them concerned Adam Lanza's mother. She was apparently not a teacher at the school, and we now know she was murdered at home by her son in her bed before he went to the school.

4 comments:

B.Poster
said...

When I first saw the headline on msn before reading the article, my first thought was "if all the teachers and administrators had been armed and trained in the use of firearms, this tradgedy likely would have been prevented and these kids liekly would still be alive." Apparently you are thinking along the same lines.

After reading the article my thoughts were how did the murderer defeat the security system at the school? I think you pretty much explained it in your post. The shooter was well known to school officials and would have easily slipped through with no suspicion.

My next thought was the Israelis deal with a significant and violent "5th column" on a daily basis, why don't they have this type of thing happen more often? I think you pretty much explain that as well.

While security procedures are well and good, they tend to be defensive in nature only. No one ever won a war while only playing defense. There needs to be offensive approaches as well. Arming all teachers and administators in the use of fire arms would be a great place to start. Also, study how the Israelis study how the Israelis handle these things and try to implement as much of what they do as is possible. If one wants to be the best, study the best and learn from the best!!

Of course do I expect this federal government to do ANY of this? No, I don't. For some reason common sense escapes the leftists who currently run things on the federal level. In the mean time, I'd suspec everyone should be armed and trained in how to use firearms and they should be procured in any way possible. Preferably leagally of course. As such, I think it most prudent to reside in a state that has the right to carry a concealed weapon.

Apparently the killer had a history of mental illness. Might it be prudent to develop a profile of the people likely to do this sort of thing and take proactive approaches to stopping these things before they happen by any means necessary. Of course this would invovle "profiling" which is strictly illegal and will not be tolerated by the leftists who currently run things, as the only "profiling" currently permitted is that agianst their poliitical enemies who pose no threat to the nation!! Once again, common sense escapes the leftist who currently run things on the federal level. Either that or they or just plain evil.

Eitther way I'd expect more of the same from them. More gun control, less freedom of movement, and more regulation. This is the exact opposite of what is needed!!

Increased regulation makes it more difficult for law abiding citizens to procure the necessary firearms and training in the use of these firearms necessary for the defense of their children and their families. All of our freedoms must be restricted because we cannot profile. In the meantime, precious resources are wasted monitoring people who pose no threat and the criminals are getting away. As for more gun control, this means an already vunerable citizenry would be even more vunerable than they already are. As it is, for the most part, the criminals have nothing to fear. Arm the citizens, give the criminals something to worry about, and these types of murderous rampages should be much fewer in number or frequency.

The blame for this is primarily on the leftists who currently run things. Of course part of being a leftist means never having to accept responsibility for ones actions or needing apologize for any thing.

It may not work perfectly every time, as nothing is ever a hundred percent gauranteed but it will give the teachers and others responsible for the care of the children a fighting chance to protect the children. Arming the teachers and training them in the proper use of firearms would most definitely be a better approach than the one we are currently taking.

Had the teachers and other adults on school property been armed, they likely would have eliminated the killer before he killed anyone or at the very least far fewer would have been killed. In other words, more people would be alive today if the adults were armed and trained in the use of these weapons.

Since it will lead to a better situation than what we currently have by saving more innocent lives, it will "totally work." What is needed is common sense solutions and not fall backs on ideology.

"You either support gun control or you suppor the slaughter of kindergarten children." No reasonble person would support the slaughter of children. "Gun control" as it is currently implemented has not worked. It has only served to disarm the law abiding citizens and has made it easier for the criminals. As such, it cannot be supported, if ones goal is to protect the innocent. If one's goal is not the protection of the innocent but merely the advancement of certain political ideologies, this may be a different situaion entirely. Any good teacher will do whatever is necessary to protect his or her students, by arming them they will have fighting chance to preserve the lives of their students and themselves.

Not sure what Fox news has to do with this. I'm not even sure what their position is on this nor am I certain what relevance it has.

I think we can agree that it is sad that things have come to this. Unfortunately this has been the culimination of misguided gun control rules that have left the innocent vunerable.

A bit off topic but after the attacks of 911 pilots can now be armed. They understood the need to be armed in order to protect themselves and their passengers. Furthermore had the passangers on the planes, at the time of those attacks, been armed and known how to use those weapons the attacks could have been prevented.

I think Rob says it best with the following: "You don't defend the innocent against insanity and murder by legislation. You do it by being ready, willing, and able to take up arms on their behalf to protect them." In the current environment, failure to arm teachers, adminstrators, and other charged with the care of children with the proper tools to protect these children and themselves is to fail in our fiduciary responsibility to them.